Welcome dialog prevents immediate use of application

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Wednesday 24 Oct 2012 12:05:00 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> The discussions about the template icons is just as old: the problem is
> that nobody creates templates with good icons for Words or Sheets -- not
> the kind of gorgeous templates that exist for iWork --
> http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/#easy.

Yes, of course that's a serious problem across most open source projects.  We 
need more graphic designers generally.  But if enough noise were made about 
this, I think people would step up to help.

> And then there's the problem that we tried to have one common gui paradigm
> for very different applications. That's broken already with the toolbox
> changes in words, of course. For some applications, a welcome screen is
> really necessary because there just doesn't exist a useful blank document
> (stage, krita -- see also the welcome dialog for loimpress, or the
> discussion about the default screen l&f for gimp).

Yeah, that's fair enough.  Some applications may need some kind of mode 
selection before they can really start.  I feel it's important in this case 
that the screen appears in the already-open application, to at least give a 
feeling that the big featureful application is there waiting for you, rather 
than feeling as though the dialog is all there is.  For instance, consider 
QtCreator's welcome screen: colourful, reassuring, friendly, non-modal.

> When a finnish usability group investigated calligra, it actually found
> that users didn't have a problem with the welcome screen -- many
> developers feel it is horrible, and that it _must_ be bad usability, but
> that's actually not borne out by the research.

That is interesting; I'd be interested in hearing exactly how they tested 
this.

> > More importantly, though, the dialog presents me with an immediate feeling
> > of frustration: "I just want to *play* with this application; why won't
> > it let me in?"
> 
> Well, that's another thing: you want to *play* with the application, the
> screen is designed for people who want *work* with the application.

I understand your reaction, but I believe play is an important part of 
discovery.  If an application is not fun to play with, users will not try to 
discover its features, and ultimately will find it a chore to use.

> But that would actually mean extra steps for a user who wants to do work.
> Like currently with lowriter, where you start the application, get a more
> or less useless default document, then go new/Templates and Documents to
> select a template. The result is that most people I know load an old
> document that was created with the right template, remove the content,
> type new content -- and then if recording is on, there's an information
> leak.

You make a good point here.  However, I was thinking of something a bit more 
prominent, such as a landing page in a sidebar saying "Choose your template", 
looking something like this: http://ur1.ca/amoz2.  The key is to avoid modal 
dialogs.  If possible, I'd prefer to see the dialog embedded somewhere 
prominent, but where the user can still choose to ignore it (or easily dismiss 
it) if he doesn't want to think about templates and suchlike.  Not necessarily 
easy to implement, but something like this would get in the way of the user 
less.

Thanks for your quick reply,
Paul